It's all very well showering us with release dates and pricing (well, for Japan anyway) and the trailers and screenshots certainly don't do any harm, but how well does Nintendo think the 3DS will perform sales-wise?

Nintendo is predicting the 3DS to shift more than 4 million units by the end of the fiscal year ending March 2011. With the Japanese launch on February 26th, that gives the company a little over a month to meet that target. To put that into perspective, that's roughly 19% of the DS hardware sales for the entire fiscal year in just 33 days.

A decline in Japanese sales of Nintendo's current line-up, however, has the company making modifications to its hardware and software forecast sales figures. Wii hardware projections for the year ending March 2011 have been reduced from 18 million units to 17.5 million, slightly lower than the actual 20.53 million that were shifted the previous year. Along with all those consoles, 191.81 million software titles were sold. In conjunction with the decline in hardware sales, software forecasts for the year ending March 2011 have been cut from 165 million to 135 million.

The same goes for the DS. The year ending March 2010 saw 27.11 million units shifted, and this fiscal year's forecast has been reduced from 30 million units to 23.5 million. Software projections have dropped down to 125 million from the original 150 million, compared to the previous year of 151.59 million.